Application of motive power batteries to industrial vehicles requires integration of the vehicles, batteries and charging systems. Proper monitoring of all components is necessary in order to insure continued operation of the vehicle, optimize its operation and schedule proper maintenance and repair when needed, thereby maintaining optimal performance level, reducing down time and avoiding costly repairs with replacement of the components that are likely to break or degrade performance.
Conventional batteries, chargers and vehicles, and related equipment lack centralized monitoring capabilities. To the extent that monitoring capabilities exist, they are merely local to a given unit, i.e., they operate only in isolation with respect to the given unit. Typically, a given unit will have no capability for monitoring and collecting data from and about its (namely, the unit's) performance. Failure to monitor and maintain these components, however, will result in reduced efficiency or in failure of the vehicle or unit.
In most conventional systems, the battery, vehicle and charger are monitored independently. In many cases, the same variable data is recorded in different systems or combinations.
Typical Industry Monitoring
Many suppliers of industrial batteries, chargers and vehicles offer specific monitoring instruments, or include some form of monitoring in their products. Such instruments and/or monitoring are more common on higher cost or more sophisticated products. The majority of conventional industrial electric vehicles and peripheral equipment do not have these capabilities.
In the conventional systems, monitoring typically requires and depends on the sophisticated hardware that is installed on the battery itself or peripheral equipment connected to the battery. The hardware is designed to be intimately familiar with the equipment and the environment that it is monitoring and stores long term data directly in some memory that is on the device or peripheral equipment connected to the device.
For the majority of the industrial vehicle components that have no monitoring instrumentation and capabilities, the burden of maintaining performance falls squarely on the user, and requires the user to undertake, collect, record and evaluate manual measurements of the equipment in use. This is often not properly or is erroneously recorded by the user or the measurements are incorrectly performed, resulting in lowered fleet efficiency for an extended period of time and financial losses due to inefficient operations, added repair costs and losses due to malfunction and inactivity.
To update and/or upgrade conventional industrial vehicles and batteries requires the user to actually visit the site and manually upgrade the monitoring or other hardware and/or software components.